Idiotarod

Ah, New York.... My bud's the astronaut catching up to his Pluto-loving gang (1:30 or so).

Cheers.

More Pics of the Upper Farm

Upper chicken house to the right. Corral and barn to the left. The old cotton gin used to sit in the valley on the other side of the oak trees. Myrtice Reed's trailer park above barn. Behind right oak, fire department (first thanks to eminent domain), Crystal Farms egg plant, and great-grandfather's house (not visible). Between the oaks you can see the expansion of Hwy 53 into four lanes with median. Chain link fence shows incursion into our property. Chestnut Mountain in background.


Lots of stuff at the new entrance to the farm: Barn to the right obviously. Between the span of the gate, you can see 1) cattle guard in the dirt, 2) creep feeder (with red top) full of pelletized grain for calves 3) newly planted Leyland cypress 4) pollarded Bradford pear to its left 5) of course, loader and crawler backhoe belonging to the DOT. Old entrance was at the road, obviously.

Thirty feet advanced from last picture, looking back toward the mountain. Branches in oak are the same of biggest oak in picture 1.

Photo Essay: Farm, Chestnut Mountain

Front of the upper chicken house, upper farm. The slats are pulled out over the hall (that's cobwebs and feathers and chunks of dried manure hanging from them). Metallic nests have been raised to accomodate the top of the Kubota and New Holland loader. The red drinker bells have been hung for the same purpose. The darker side of the wall is composed of fogger pads, which absord water from a mist system and hold cool moisture as fans draw it toward the back of the house. The house is basically clean, although you can see one blob of poop in the bottom right corner.

The road less traveled. Same house, halfway down. I'm standing where the slats would be normally. You can see a long metal trough at the upper left of the picture behind the drinker and at the top center. The system here is simple: The chickens eat from the troughs, poop, which falls between the chinks of the slats to the floor, then walk over to the nests and lay their eggs. We then pull back the slats and clean out the manure. Above me you can see parts of the contraption that runs feed into the house from large bins outside.

This side was especially nasty. The highway's being expanded and new water lines put in. Water pressure is all over the place (workers also accidentally removed the pressure reducer valve at the road), blowing the hoses off the drinkers randomly, and flooding the house if you don't catch it. Note the ruts in the floor. There's no traction here--it's like quicksand, black, foul quicksand. I bottomed out the loader here real good. Dirt's been brought in from the deep red bank outside to solidify the muck and fill up the subsequent swale. It's been semi-effective.

More Elbow Room Please

"Travel, except in almost inaccessible places, is no longer the answer to finding solitude. And this contraction of space on a shrinking planet suggests a time, not far off, when there will be no remoteness: nowhere to become lost, nothing to be discovered, no escape, no palpable concept of distance, no peculiarity of dresss--frightening thoughts for a traveler."

Amen, Mr. Theroux.

At home in America, our population glut will result in the obviation of open spaces; dark, impenetrable stretches; and borders charged with mystery. The aforementioned are values we here are humbly struggling to preserve.

America the Overfull

From Hydrocarbons to Carbohydrates

In his opinion piece Gentlemen, Start Your Plug-Ins, R. James Woolsey, former CIA director and current co-chair of the Committee on the Present Danger (such a strange and encompassing position that it defies comment) rhapsodizes on the future highway economics of the next breed of car batteries. Although we've heard some version of this before, plug-in hybrids, hooked up overnight to normal 110-volt outlets in the garage, are the apparent next step in automobile innovation. There are three advantages of the new technology: massive increases in fuel efficiency, capitalization of available off-peak electrical power, and the "recycling" of electricity from full batteries back to the grid, helping regulate its amperage.

Whether or not Mr. Woolsey is another sunnyside prophet, I'm not sure. His pragmatism, however, is lucent: "Subsidizing expensive substitutes for petroleum, ignoring the massive infrastructure costs needed to fuel family cars with hydrogen, searching for a single elegant solution--none of this has worked, nor will it. Instead we should encourage a portfolio of inexpensive fuels, including electricity [and processed industrial and agricultural wastes], that require very little infrastructure change and let its components work together."

Mr. Woolsey, it should be noted, is first interested in energy independence. Concerns about the environment or problems intrinsic to the operating infrastructure are not relevant--which is probably correct, since, with economic interests in the Middle East, the government can hardly concentrate its attention and spending domestically. One glaring oversight--at least from the enviornmentalist's viewpoint--is the source of national electrical production. Dependence upon coal-burning power plants is not a long-term solution. Woolsey, we suspect, would agree, but first things first.

Two other points of interest:

• According to the piece, "Indian and Chinese demand and peaking oil production" will act as safeguards against OPEC maneuvers, like increasing production to drive down prices, that might stifle new competitive technology.
• We're not necessarily talking about corn when we talk about cellulosic ethanol: "genetically modified biocatalysts" can process "the cellulose in biomass and thus enable ethanol's production from a wide range of plant life." This means that, compared with corn, little fossil fuel is needed during biomass cultivation and land use requirements present much less of a problem.

Oil Again

So the long-term, sustainable price for oil is about $40 a barrel...why, then, are we currently looking at a price about $20 higher and what does it mean?

One culprit obviously is the volatility inherent in production at this time. There's the entire Middle East to start, not to mention other oil-producing nations suffering internal discord (Nigeria) or leveraging their prized resource to restructure internal political dynamics (Venezuela). Another culprit might just be a function of the financial markets. "Billions of dollars of investment money are flowing into crude, as hedge funds and investment funds look for investment opportunities. Many in [OPEC] fear that if and when funds pull out of energy markets, possibly en masse, oil prices could drop well below the long-term equilibrium level. They could even crash."

See "Price Rally May Be Running on Empty," 12/20/06, in the WSJ.

P.J. O'Rourke in the WSJ

O'Rourke's new book is about Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations; he reads it, so you don't have to. We link two recent interviews, so you don't have to read his book. This is, we think, how ignorance gets started.

Jokers to the Right

• "Bush and the Republicans are offering a Newer Deal, a Greater Scoiety. Where the hell did this come from? And there's no other word for it but failure: failure to control spending, failure domestically and failure in Iraq." Which O'Rourke claims should soon be called "Weimar Iraq."
• "The important thing [...] is negative rights: freedom from. But politics is about positive rights: what're you going to give me? In a democracy it's always vibrating back and forth. People want the government to do everything for them, then when they see that it sucks, they want the government to let them take charge, and when that doesn't work, they want the government to come back and fix all the problems that they themselves caused when they took charge."

NPR interview.

Two New Terms for the Day: Inaugurating a Flurry of Posts

1. Zone pushing--trying plants in a region where they're not supposed to survive the winter (related to the migration of more temperate zones northward due to a "general warming effect").




2. Anamorphosis--plainly, a distorted optical image, as in that element in Holbein's The Ambassadors which, directly, resembles a misplaced and out-of-focus wedge of tabby--but from another vantage appears to be a skull.

Memento mori indeed.

A Quick Thought on Taxes

The White House likes to tout its tax cuts as the reason for our brisk economic recovery. But supply-side economics might just be a fallacy, as the movement of cash into the market depends upon the Fed's moderation of interest rates more than anything else: when it cuts rates, folks transfer their funds away from savings and into higher yield investments. So, is Bush just doing the political thing, appropriating good news for his own welfare, fudging causality back to himself?

Well, it would seem so. Since plummeting to jumpstart investment action a few years ago, interest rates have been fairly stable, rising slighly to counterbalance inflation. This would suggest that the positive effects of the President's tax cuts were largely just a coda to a greater work. There is also a matter of the terrible complexity of the modern American economy. The continuing robustness of the stock and bond markets have almost nothing to do with fluctuations in taxes. For one, what Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke called "a global savings glut," along with open foreign financial markets looking for big returns, has supported the last few years' economic expansion, promoting investment in new markets by fully embracing the risk. Also, the advent of derivatives has changed the game entirely (like going halvers on an astronomical scale); risk is now being shared between a network of crafty investors. Nobody's afraid to ante up, and it seems the market and the economy chug along inexorably.

For reference, some of the recent tax cuts:

• Low-income earners now pay 10% intead of 15% of income in taxes.
• Child tax credit.
• Estate and gift tax provisions (also a repeal of the estate tax for 2010).
• Divident tax credit (now the same rate as the capital gains tax).
• Marriage penalty relief.
• Capital-gains tax credit.

Louisiana's Shrimpers

Food (fresh and flavorful), ecology, novel markets. An important addition to the indispensables....

White Boot Brigade

Getting To Know Your U.S. Senate

He may rank dead last in seniority, but he's an organic-farming populist. Plus, he's got a flat-top, and only two digits on one hand (meat-grinder mishap...that's right, I said, meat-grinder mishap).

NPR follows Montana's John Tester.

Thanks to" the oldest flat-top haircut site" for the pic: http://www.pathguy.com/flattop.htm.

Colonizing the World, One Mexico at a Time

I'm just going to quote from the Washington Post shamelessly, no expounding:

But now, Martin worries that life in the central Mexican state of Jalisco is about to be shaken by globalization. Already much of Mexico's farm country has been overwhelmed by an influx of crops from the United States in the years following the North American Free Trade Agreement. Over the next two years, the final provisions of the trade pact kick in, opening Mexico to unlimited imports of poultry from its northern neighbor. Mexican farms will compete directly with an American agribusiness nurtured by subsidies on the corn that feeds the birds.
________

From 1993 to 2003, exports of American agriculture to Mexico more than doubled, climbing from $3.6 billion to $7.9 billion, according to Gary C. Hufbauer and Jeffrey J. Schott in their book, "NAFTA Revisited." Over a similar period, Mexico lost nearly 2 million agricultural jobs, according to Mexico's National Employment Survey.

Mexico's agricultural exports to the United States also surged, climbing from $2.7 billion in 1993 to $6.3 billion in 2003. Huge farms have been developed to grow artichokes, tomatoes and other produce for the U.S. market. But those farms, many launched with American investment, typically pay about $13 a day. That's not enough to keep workers from leaving: They can make three to four times as much in even the lowliest U.S. jobs.
________

And the growth of Mexico's export farms, though good for the owners, has had a paradoxical effect on the country's markets. Produce not good enough for American stores is trucked instead to Mexican cities, sending local prices down. On a recent morning in Guadalajara, men unloaded crates of wrinkled bell peppers arriving from the northern province of Sinaloa -- rejects from the American market. Bell peppers had been selling locally for about $13 per crate. These were $10.
________

Two hours south, in the village of Ejido Modelo Emiliano Zapata, Ruben Rivera sat on a bench in a forlorn plaza, rather than working on his seven-acre farm. He used to grow tomatoes and onions, hiring 150 workers to help at harvest. Now he doesn't even bother to plant. He can buy onions in the supermarket more cheaply than he can grow them. A crop of tomatoes yields less than the taxes. He lives off the $800 sent home monthly by his three sons, who run a yardwork business in Macon, Ga.

"For people who can grow huge scale for export, NAFTA has been good," he said. "For people like us, it's been a bloodbath."

In the nearby town of Tizapan el Alto, where traditionally 90 percent of local people have farmed, one-third of all agricultural jobs have been wiped out in the last five years, said Mayor Ramon Martinez.
________

Jalisco has long been one of the primary sources of Mexican immigrants to the United States. And its farms produce more than 10 percent of Mexico's poultry. What happens next year, when the tariffs come off chicken imported from the United States, could test how continued globalization is altering life on both sides of the border.

In the town Atotonilco el Alto, Sergio Garcia's chicken houses are scattered among lemon orchards and rows of blue-green agave cactus, the source of tequila. Garcia is betting that Fresko Pollo, the chicken business his father started from the back of a truck in 1950, can survive the expected American onslaught by catering to local tastes. His workers weigh chickens and slaughter only those of ideal size. He runs a chain of retail shops, where he sells marinated breasts, chicken sausages and smoked chicken prepared at his processing plant.

"I'm not so worried, because we're not just producers," Garcia said. "Despite free trade, niches remain."

But he knows he faces a formidable foe. An archetype of efficiency, the American poultry industry is dominated by enormous brands that control all aspects of production -- employing computerized feed mills that mix grains, mechanized slaughterhouses, and hatcheries that use genetic science to breed disease-resistant chicks.

At Garcia's feed mill, workers shovel grain by hand. At his slaughterhouse, a man slices throats with a wood-handled blade.

Feed amounts to nearly 60 percent of the cost of raising a chicken. For the American poultry industry, the cost has been held down, historically, by subsidies for corn production. In 2005, American cropland for corn received a range of subsidies worth more than $10 billion, according to a Washington Post analysis of data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Labor, where Mexico has an advantage, makes up only about 5 percent of production costs.
Already, Garcia is feeling the pressure. Americans prefer breast meat, while Mexicans opt for dark. So U.S. poultry producers can sell leg quarters -- dark meat -- in Mexico at low prices and still make money. From January 2005 to January 2006, even though a 59 percent tariff applied to some chicken imports, the wholesale price of chicken leg quarters sold in Mexico City plunged by nearly one-fourth, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Next year, as NAFTA's final provisions kick in, the door opens to unlimited imports.

"The price will fall," Garcia said. "It could drop by half."

In the village of Pegueros, a center of poultry, NAFTA is a word laden with anxiety. Corn farmers saw prices fall due to American imports, though demand for ethanol in the United States, made from corn, is now sending prices up. Dairy farmers have been decimated, a trend expected to intensify next year as protections on powdered milk expire.

The forces of trade have laid waste to the Mexican dream of Trino Franco, who came home three years ago to launch a dairy business with his three brothers after more than a decade in the north. He poured $40,000 into the venture -- everything he saved in Los Angeles, where he parked cars at a 24-hour gym from six in the morning until two in the afternoon, then worked security at a hotel until 11 at night.

But the price of milk has dropped by nearly one-fifth in the last year. The farm has lost money, forcing Franco, 38, to take a job as general manager at a larger dairy operation. He earns $200 a week, enough to keep him home with his wife and baby. For now.

"You can't see a good future in this area," he said. "That's why so many people cross the border."

Pedro Martin, still at home while so many friends and relatives make their lives in another country, is intent that his three boys -- 13, 8 and eight months -- stay in Mexico. On a recent morning, as firecrackers boomed in salute to Mexico's patron saint, Guadalupe, a procession of shiny SUVs pulled into Pegueros, their license plates advertising the riches of Texas, Virginia and California. People were returning for Christmas.

Martin professed no envy. His sister and her two boys are crammed into an $1,100-a-month apartment in San Francisco. The boys have to work to help pay the rent. "They're thinking of returning," Martin said. His own boys are growing up with the fresh air and broad vistas of Jalisco.

But in the adjacent town of Tepatitlan, the people in control of the poultry farms are fretting. They are organizing into cooperatives to improve their bargaining position as they brace for a flood of imports next year. The well-trod path to El Norte is never far from their minds.

"If there are corn subsidies in the United States and none here, we're dead," said Lorenzo Martin, president of the Tepatitlan Poultry Farmers Association and the head of one large producer. "If the U.S. starts selling things extra cheap outside the U.S., then it won't just be small farmers and individuals who will be leaving. It will be people like me."

In Mexico, 'People Do Really Want To Stay'

Doug Monroe, Metro Savant

Addendum to last post, or more on internalizing external costs:

So, raise the gas tax and, on top of whatever you want to give the DOT, allocate some revenue for mass transit. Or, don't raise taxes and just appropriate revenue away from the general fund (aka porkbarreling fund?) and toward mass transit. These are the relevant facts:

Georgia has a 7.5 percent excise tax on each gallon of gas purchased as well as a 4 percent sales tax—among the lowest in the country. State law requires that all the excise tax and 75 percent of the sales tax be spent on roads and bridges—not mass transit. The rest of the sales tax goes into the general fund.

The italicized portion above comes from Mr. Monroe over at Atlanta Mag, and he has a handy summary of the region's transportation crisis.